The President of Guinea who died a couple of days ago said on tv that he was the head of state for life and that there would never be any transition in that country. Robert Mugabe said in a speech recently ' Zimbabwe is mine. I will never, never, never, never surrender.' Clearly he means that Zimbabwe is his personal property to do as he pleases and the people are his slaves to abey his orders and if they died of hunger or cholera then he did not care. Surely this is not the case in India? After all we loudly maintain that we are the largest democracy in the world by which we mean that elections are held every few years where millions of dispossessed illiterate people are bribed with promises of cheap rice or free electricity to vote for whichever criminal that has the largest number of goons to frighten the electorate. The criminals in India have understood that once you win an election you can control the police and loot the exchequer without any fear of being detected let alone
being brought to trial. The irony is that the police are then guarding the same criminals instead of putting them in handcuffs. Yesterday a Member of the Legislative Assembly, MLA, of UP beat an engineer to death because he refused to donate Rs. 5 million for Mayawati's birthday celebrations and then in total contempt of the law he dropped the body at a police station instead of taking the man to hospital. There are two points here. First the MLA probably thought that the engineer being a sarkari employee must have taken a lot of bribes and would have the necessary black money. The second point is that he must have thought that the police would probably cover up his crime. And to make sure that their loot continues every politicaian makes sure that his criminal children get prominent positions in the parties. The only way to survive would be to have genuine democracy where we the citizens have genuine power. That can only be done by building citizens' corporations who will have the power to challenge politicians and kleptocrats. Of course the filthy crooks will fight never to let that happen.